My sons and I still use "why don't you use dah wegulah ahmy?" from time to time!

I love a good quotable movie. 

I rewatched Alien and Aliens this weekend. The two films aged really well, despite the depicted technology looking decidedly dated at times.

Naturally, by now many people know all the dialogues by heart and surprise isn't much of a factor, but the thrill is still there. What creativity, and what a lot of fun the people on set must have had bringing these images to life. (I really liked the documentary on the shooting of Aliens that came with the DVD; a lot of the very convincing effects were due to sheer inventiveness and required very little money. In fact, the latter prompted the former).

After that, I made the mistake of watching Alien: Covenant. Ouch. I first saw it with my two boys when the film came out, and because it's always fun to have an all-boys outing (my wife isn't much of a fan and wasn't there!) I still have a good memory of it... but by golly, Covenant has so many problems. It has its moments, but when they're put together they're like chocolate-covered tuna or dill pickles in orange juice.

I won't go through all the film's plot holes, because Ryan George did such a great job of it in a Pitch Meeting episode. However, I'd like to point a specific one out that struck me at the end. Ridley Scott decided that the aliens (I will never call them the x word, which was meant as a joke in Aliens) were the creation of the android David, using the Engineers black oil as a starting point. I dislike the concept immensely, because as often occurs in sequels it makes the universe so much smaller; not everything has to be connected. But beyond that, it creates a continuity problem. At the end of Covenant, the least surprising plot twist ever reveals that David has taken the place of the benevolent android Walther and is going to contaminate all 2,000 colonists from the Origae-6 colony with alien embryos. That is an appropriately sinister ending for the movie, but... if an entire colony becomes a breeding ground for these monsters, how is it possible that many years later, Earth has never, ever heard of them? And not only Ripley and her crew, but also the company Burke worked for half a century later? 

Maybe the cancelled sequel to Covenant (a.k.a. Aliens 7, Prometheus 3, or Covenant 2) would have revealed that David's plan failed and that the ship would crash elsewhere, where no human would find it. Or maybe David would have been chased down by angry Engineers. It's not as if the plot hole is impossible to fill; it's just that at this time it doesn't square with the earlier films. But then neither does the Engineer from Alien having been much larger than the ones we saw in Prometheus, nor the wall sculptures from Prometheus, depicting an alien before David had a chance to create them. Is there no editor around?

I also have a question for our British friends: when I saw Aliens on a VHS cassette in Germany, it had a short but very good scene where Ripley and Hicks exchange their given name. That scene wasn't part of the original release in America (and still isn't found in the "classic" version), although it was added to the extended cut. However, what I saw back then in Germany wasn't the aforementioned extended cut, because the scene in which the colonists find the ship wasn't included.

Maybe the original European cut was slightly different from the American one? Does anyone in Europe remember seeing that scene in the '80s or '90s?

How did I not answer this the first time around? Weird.

The answer is Alien.